Comments on Three Documents Concerning Medals and Decorations for Meritorious Personnel [I]
(November 20, 1954)
Carry out as instructed. Several words have been deleted.
The six characters “and Chairman Mao Zedong” should be removed.
Mao Zedong
November 20th
Mao Zedong
November 20th
[I]
This document is one of Mao Zedong’s comments on three documents submitted by the Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China on November 3, 1954, regarding the conferral of medals and decorations upon meritorious personnel of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Prior to Mao Zedong’s review,

on November 16, 1954,
Yang Shangkun forwarded these three documents to Zhou Enlai along with a letter, in which he pointed out that a certain issue in the draft resolution and the draft regulations needed consideration. Specifically, the terms “Second Domestic Revolutionary War Period” and “Third Domestic Revolutionary War Period,” as used in the original texts, had, during discussions at the Politburo, been deemed likely to raise questions concerning the First Domestic Revolutionary War Period. Accordingly, he proposed revising them to read “Period of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” and “Liberation War Period,” respectively.

On November 19, Zhou Enlai transmitted the documents—now revised under his scrutiny—to Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi for their approval. As a result, the phrases “Second Domestic Revolutionary War Period” and “Third Domestic Revolutionary War Period” in those documents had already been replaced with “Period of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” and “Liberation War Period,” respectively. When Mao Zedong stated in his first comment, “Carry out as instructed,” he was referring to this very matter. The “several words” he mentioned were the six characters “and Chairman Mao Zedong” that were deleted from the sentence “Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, together with the people of the whole country, heroically waged a long revolutionary war” while reviewing the draft resolution of the Standing Committee of the First National People’s Congress on awarding medals and decorations to meritorious personnel of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army during the Chinese Revolutionary War.

Document II consists of Mao Zedong’s comments written on the aforementioned draft resolution of the NPC Standing Committee. In November 1954, Mao Zedong posed for a group photograph with his staff on Yuexiu Mountain in Guangzhou.